SpaceX Staff Engineer: telemetry take-home, project presentation, HashMap from scratch and a Distributed Task Scheduler

This was by far the longest interview process I had ever done so be prepared to commit a lot more time to this.

The first round was a call with a recruiter which was a pretty standard behavioural round asking about my experience and motivations for SpaceX. You should be very clear on why you want to join and hopefully excited. I think they really index on this.

The next round was a take home coding assessment which they recommend to take 4 hours on but I spent 8 hours on it because I really wanted the job lol. It involved telemetry data and was easy to solve with AI but the key thing is to understand the solution deeply and be able to explain how you got the final solution.

After that was a review of the coding assessment and speaking to multiple higher ups.

Then came the biggest one of them all, the onsite interview loop, which consisted of 4 back-to-back sessions. It included doing a project presentation of previous work. They go super deep on this so be sure to know it inside out. The next coding task was to design a hashmap from scratch. After that was the HLD which was a Distributed Task Scheduler where they went deep on fault tolerance and scaling. The final part was a behavioral round where they asked about projects I had owned in the past and the outcomes as well as my motivations for wanting to join.

Finally after a week I got an offer which I was delighted with. The comp isn't as much as other tech companies but the culture and mission is pretty special imo. For advice I would say to spend as much time as possible covering what I mentioned above so give yourself the best chance of getting an offer.